Piece of Mind
by NthClockmaker
Summary: The events of Deathly Hallows damaged Harry's mind. Others try to fix him.


Piece of Mind

Warnings: Some language, mentions of self-harm. Canon compliant except for DH epilogue.

A/N: There will probably eventually be some mild HG/LL here, but romance isn't really the point of this story, and it will only ever be a sub-plot. If you're offended by girl-girl relationships though, you might want to leave.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

_Prologue_

It happened slowly, almost imperceptibly, but it would be a lie to say Harry didn't notice it until it was there. It was always, quite literally, in the back of his mind. It was just hard for him to care.

It was hard for him to care about anything, most of the time.

The first few days after Voldemort died, there was too much to do to be able to think. There was the Elder wand to put back in the ground, and bodies to bury, so many funerals to attend that the smell of lilies became permanently fused into his skin, wrapping him like a shroud. He did not cry, not because he was ashamed, but because he was simply too worn out. He was high on lack of sleep and lingering adrenaline, rushing from thing to thing before collapsing into bed for a few hours. He didn't have time to feel anything. He held Ginny as she sobbed and held Hermione when Ron wasn't sure how to deal with her sobbing and patted Ron on the back as he pretended not to cry, and that was his first week after being killed and coming back. He was still staying at Hogwarts, along with a few students who had lost their families and a handful of teachers. They did not talk to each other, absorbed in their own grief, and Harry avoided thinking about having to go back to Grimmauld place.

After a while, things wound down, but he found that nothing changed. There was nothing more to do, but he still wasn't sleeping and wasn't crying and wasn't feeling. He finally went back to Grimmauld place, and it wasn't as hard as he thought it would be. It didn't bring back a rush of painful memories. It was just a house, and a place where he could be alone. He told his friends he needed some space, and Hermione nodded sympathetically and chased everyone away. She told him before she left that they were all there for him, if he wanted to talk.

Harry didn't want to talk. He didn't know what he wanted.

He asked Kreacher to leave him alone for a while, and Kreacher bowed and looked slightly hurt as he disapparated, and Harry couldn't even feel guilty. He ate his own terrible cooking and, when the food in the house began to run out, dusty old cans of beans and vegetables he found in the cellar. He didn't leave Grimmauld place.

When he had searched every corner of the house and hadn't turned up any more food, and had finally acknowledged that he wasn't going to feel any more like going out, he ended his self-imposed isolation and went to the burrow. He did this mostly because of the only other option he could see, and the amount of thought he gave it. He could either leave the house, or he could stay there and starve, and Harry couldn't see anything wrong with the latter option. He thought he'd actually be able to do it, the way he was now.

But he knew it was disgusting to think of death so callously, so he picked up and went to visit the Weasleys.

Mrs. Weasley hugged him and Mr. Weasley clapped him on the shoulder and they were pale and red-eyed and smiled like it was hurting their faces and they wanted to talk anyway. They wanted to talk about Harry, despite what they'd been through. They wanted to make sure he was alright.

Harry was polite and vague, and he extricated himself as quickly as possible and went to talk to Ron.

Ron greeted him awkwardly, and did not try to talk about feelings, for which Harry was grateful. But without feelings, there wasn't much to talk about. Their most common topics of conversation- school, quidditch, girls, defeating Voldemort- were either no longer relevant or seemed too frivolous to mention.

"It's good," Ron said at last. "That it's over."

Harry nodded and agreed and then Ginny came in, and Ron left to give them some space.

The first thing Ginny did when the door closed was kiss him, softly on the lips. She was beautiful and warm and smelled of bread and lemon soap and wild roses and Harry didn't want this. He wanted her kisses to be the best memories he had, perfect moments in his fucked up life. He didn't want them when he was cold and dull and muffled, his apathy tainting them and making them less than they were.

Ginny talked about her year at school under Voldemort and about Fred and about how broken her parents were and about how utterly, completely _broken _George was and about her friends who had lost their family and friends she had lost and about how worried she had been about him and Ron and Hermione and how terrified she had been about Luna. She told him how much she loved him.

Then she asked "So what about you?" and Harry said "Ginny, I can't do this."

She blinked. "It's okay. You don't have to talk right away."

"No. I can't do _this. _I can't do us."

And he told her how he still loved her, he just needed some time to get himself together, and how sorry he was, and she looked angry and hurt but tried so, so hard to be understanding, and it should have upset Harry. He should have felt compassion and guilt and love and grief and regret.

He should have felt something.

Over the summer, he didn't visit his friends. He stayed at number 12, Grimmauld place and didn't talk to anyone he knew beside Kreacher. He was told that the Dursleys had gone back to Privet Drive, but he didn't try to contact them. He read the Daily Prophet and the Quibbler and quidditch magazines Ron had told him about. He searched through the corners of the house that were still piled with unknown goods. He read thick, difficult books Hermione recommended. He sent owls to his friends regularly, his letters much shorter than their news-filled ones. He learned how to be alone as the world put itself back together.

Emptiness wasn't crushing him. It was just filling him up, replacing the heaviness of his blood and the air in his lungs until he felt he would float away.

He remembered how, after Sirius died, he had screamed at Dumbledore that he didn't want to be human if he had to feel that kind of pain. In that moment, he couldn't have imagined what it would be like not to feel. He couldn't have imagined this. He wanted the pain he knew should be drowning him. He wanted to cry with the others, comrades in grief. He wanted to break, because he couldn't heal if he didn't break first. He wanted to be human, and sometimes he wasn't entirely sure if he was. He told himself that this was a normal reaction to stress, and it was perfectly natural. When he failed to convince himself, he told himself that it was only temporary. When he was still skeptical, he told himself that even if it wasn't, it wouldn't be too bad. This was such an obvious lie that he didn't bother making more excuses. He went to bed and woke up less than two hours later, unsatisfied.

He returned to school in September for his NEWT year, and met Hermione and Neville and Luna and the Weasleys at the station like any other year.

"You look exhausted, Harry!" were the first words out of Hermione's mouth.

Harry wasn't at all sleepy, but he never got more than 3 hours of sleep a night anymore, so he supposed it must show.

"Have you been having nightmares?" she asked, her brow creasing.

"No," he said. "I haven't been dreaming." He hadn't had a single dream since June.

They found a compartment together on the train. Ginny avoided Harry's eyes. Hermione scooted in beside her before Ron could invite her to sit beside him, and didn't look at him for the rest of the train ride. Ron didn't look at anyone but Hermione. Neville looked at Luna, and Luna's eyes were a little too unfocused and dreamy. Harry looked at everyone, and tried to see into their minds, as though if he could see how theirs worked, he could see what was wrong with his.

He started the school year as an actor. He smiled when others smiled, laughed when they did, frowned and complained when they did. He didn't get the feeling he was fooling many people. He had never been much of an actor. But luckily, people were mostly too wrapped up in their own problems to afford him much attention. Hermione tried to get him to talk, but he kept up his façade until she was too exasperated to question him further.

In the end it didn't matter. Within a couple months, he couldn't even pretend anymore.

The whole school was oddly subdued. Clubs and quidditch were canceled. Ron grumbled, but Harry was secretly relieved. He didn't have to pretend to care, or concentrate on anything besides classes. School was much harder than it had ever been before. At first he thought it was because it was because of the NEWTs, but then he was reading the same paragraphs in books over and over without comprehending a word, and losing the thread of his thoughts mid-sentence, and drifting off into his head when people were talking as if he was listening to one of Professor Binns' lectures. He no longer became bored lying in bed pretending to sleep for hours.

He began losing time, just seconds at first, but soon he was blanking out for minutes at a time. He would think he was being possessed if he didn't snap out of to find Hermione shaking him, saying "You were just sitting there for ages, you wouldn't answer me, I was so scared."

When he tried to take notes, the writing quickly turned into doodles of wet eyes and pieces of skin and bloody quills and dark shapes that Ron called "Right disturbing, mate."

His memory became worse than Neville's, and his ability to focus made Luna wonder, aloud and at length, whether wrackspurts could actually enter a person's brain through their ears and take up residence there. His grades went through the floor, as he could neither answer his teacher's questions nor, when asked, tell them what they had been talking about. Hermione was driven to distraction.

"What are you thinking about?" She asked desperately. "What's going on in your head?" But it wasn't in the usual _why don't you care more about your grades _Hermione way. It was genuine concern.

He was not really surprised when he fell down the stairs. Walking into walls and tripping over his own feet had become regular occurrences at that point, so it had only been a matter of time. When he looked down at his bloodied knee, though, he was the closest he had come to surprise in a long time. He wasn't badly hurt, but he was still hurt. He should have felt pain.

He tested to make sure it wasn't a fluke, the broken piece of Sirius's mirror against his wrist. There was blood, and scars to hide, but no pain. That was when he realized he needed to tell someone.

He told Hermione first. She and Ron were fighting about something, so he couldn't talk to them both at the same time, and he got the impression that Ron had been avoiding the subject. Hermione wanted to talk. After he gave his stumbling explanation of _I can't dream I can't feel I can barely even think anymore, _Hermione hugged him and reassured him it was probably some form of post-traumatic stress, and Harry didn't contradict her. She wanted him to tell someone, professor McGonagall maybe, but he refused. McGonagall was not Dumbledore, or Sirius, and he didn't really want to tell anyone else. Telling Hermione was something familiar, at least.

He told Ron in passing, and Ron nodded and tried to smile, perhaps encouragingly, perhaps sympathetically, and they were silent for a while.

"Must be nice," Ron said eventually. "Not to have to feel anything."

Harry was distantly aware that a couple of years ago he would have shouted at Ron for this remark, told him he didn't understand. Now, however, he couldn't summon up the energy to care, and he didn't want to fight with Ron, so he stayed silent.

The rest of the year mostly blurred together in his head. Hermione was solely responsible for him not failing all his classes. She gave him her notes and helped him with his work and did more than a bit of it for him. She read up on PTSD in muggle books and some wizard books which sounded like they were about something similar to her. He noticed vaguely that she and Ron were no longer talking to each other, and that they went to great lengths to avoid being in the same room as each other, but it wouldn't stick in his head. Nothing would stick in his head, really. He didn't hang around with Ron as much. Neither of them was really sure how to act, as acting normally was out of the question. Harry thought Ron didn't know how to talk to him anymore. After all, it was hard to talk to a friend when he couldn't finish a conversation, and sometimes not even a sentence, without forgetting what he was talking about. He didn't talk to Ginny at all. He still talked to Neville sometimes, who was gentle and patient and sad. Luna talked to him the same as always, completely unperturbed. He lost track of his other friends. It was too much to keep in his head.

He passed his exams, like his classes, only through Hermione's efforts. She managed to brew a very complicated, very much against the rules potion to enhance focus.

"It's not really bad if you need it to concentrate at all," she reasoned, biting her lip. "It's like… like the magical version of Ritalin." She still hadn't found anything remotely helpful or relevant in her books.

It did help. It wasn't anything near like what he used to have, but it was enough for him to scrape acceptables" in his NEWTs. The ministry offered to let him become an auror anyway, in light of what he'd done, but he refused. Aurors needed to be sharp at all times, and he could barely hold himself together with the help of potions. He told everyone he was taking some time off, and they agreed it was a good idea. Hermione promised to send him potion every week, and to visit him as often as she could. He went back to Grimmauld place, and drank Hermione's disgusting-tasting potion, and answered her letters and the occasional letter from Ron, and he waited for something to change.

A/N: I will continue this even if no one reviews, because I'm having a lot of fun with it. Reviews are still really appreciated though. :)


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